Gossip

That T-mobile "no data" 3G story and a successful splog

Splogs are spam blogs. You take a legit RSS news feed, feed it into a bit of software which posts it on your blog. Normally, you get ignored. But in the case of one splog, Gizmo News, it seems, you hit the big time...

We're still waiting (eight hours later) for NewsNow to respond to our request for an interview, but if you check out their "top stories" for the last 24 hours, you'll see that there's a striking similarity between Engadget's "T-Mobile to debut 3G as voice-only. No data. We're over it." and the story in GN which is headlined: "T-Mobile to debut 3G as voice-only. No data. We're over it." Same copy, same author.

The story was picked up by Joshua Karp at Boy Genius originally; and Engadget (quite rightly) gave credit to BG. As is normal, it added relatively little, but BG's hits will have gone up as a result.

(Exactly how anybody can actually run a 3G network and block data traffic isn't clear, but T-Mobile is going to tell people that's the plan).

But why is NewsNow, normally a scrupulously careful aggregator, plugging Gizmo News?

When they tell us, we'll pass it on.